LuneOS August Stable Release: Café Touba

Those were a quick 2 months! As you know during summer things always slow down a bit due to people taking holidays. Some of our devs had some well deserved time off as well, but others kept working hard on bringing bug fixes, improvements & new features to the OS! We’re very pleased to present you our latest monthly stable release, Café Touba or “Touba” for short.

We were able to crush quite a few annoying bugs that occurred in the lower system level that were leftovers of the Yocto migrations we did earlier. It turned out some of our NodeJS components were using deprecated functions that weren’t available anymore in our NodeJS 4.4.x version. These have now all been addressed and as a result stability is back where it used to be. Contacts can sync properly again for example.

We have also implemented a lot of the back end bits to make instant messaging (IM) work again (including Skype). You can now add IM accounts successfully using the accounts app and receive messages. Sending still has some issues which need to be sorted and are on our radar to be done for the next release. There is also more work to be done in the back end to deal with deletion of messages, group chats, and new contact requests, etc.

We have also done some major rework on banner handling, notifications and dashboards, and their icons and sounds. The behavior should now be very similar to legacy webOS.

Incoming phone calls will now play a ringtone and the call audio by default isn’t on speakerphone anymore.

The browser should now take up a bit more screen real estate when in full screen mode. We’re working on a full and proper full screen mode for a next release. We have also addressed some of the scaling issues on various websites and are now using Prelude at places where it wasn’t working properly before on both websites and apps.

We’ve also gotten MTP working properly, so you can connect your device to your PC and simply copy & paste files to and from your device. The UI for this still needs a little polishing, but the functionality is working well. We’ve tested Windows & Linux systems on various devices and it works.

We have also fixed a lot of the PNG images which had an incorrect sRGB profile which previous caused spamming in the logs.

Main Changes:

– Incoming calls will now have proper audio routing & a ringtone playing. – Issues with various NodeJS services have been solved, so things like Contact sync will work again. – MTP can now be used to cut, copy & past files when connected to a PC/Laptop. – The Browser app now can use full screen more properly, Prelude is used in more places and the scaling issues on some websites has been resolved. – A lot of work has been done on the IM (instant messaging) backend. Adding an account and receiving messages now works.

Known issues:

– Splash screen disappears too quickly (though it has improved a lot since we fixed some high CPU usage problems). – Node-SQLite3 is currently not working. Components using Node-SQLite3 have switched to an alternative storage method for now.

Don’t forget to contact us with any questions and feel free to join the discussion on the webOS Nation forums. Catch us on Twitter @webosports on IRC: Freenode:#webos-ports or email webos.ports@gmail.com.